The Green Crayon Story

As a person born after the 18th century, I grew up using crayons as an outlet to control my budding artistic "ability." Being a person growing up in the 1990's, I had a crayon set that had dozens of colors, ranging from gold and silver to lime green and burnt umber.

Aside #1: I've never seen "umber" used as a color outside crayon-speak.

As any kid that has ever owned a single crayon will tell you, when one of these wax sticks was worn down to a useless nub, it was a sad day for all involved. Even worse, when one broke into two equally useless pieces, the resulting anger unleashed from the single affected child could be dangerous.

Or, if you were like me, you'd simply throw away the pieces and get on with your life. Such was the case, one afternoon during the second grade. I'd snapped my "basic" green crayon in half while coloring something with the sort of feverish back-and-forth motion that is usually reserved for the most violent of those among us males who masturbate regularly. Not wanting to walk all the way to the trash can in the kitchen from my boy-cave located in the far back of our house at the time, I opted to throw the bits away in the bin located in the bathroom next to my room instead.

Aside #2: When I was a kid, I begged my parents to let me have a trash can in my bedroom, something they didn't give me until I was well into my teens.

I should have never seen that crayon again. But I did, the next day after I'd come home from school. Both pieces were sitting on the dining room table in front of my mother, who was sitting in her usual dinner-time seat, waiting for me. Immediately, she launched into what I now assume was a rehearsed speech about how she had been cleaning the bathroom earlier and had found the crayon pieces in the trash. Upon further inspection, she said, it appeared that the crayon had been bitten by a pair of human teeth, assumedly mine.

Now, I feel like I need to mention my age again at this point. I was in the second grade, around the age of eight or nine. I started reading when I was three or four. At the risk of sounding slightly egotistical, I was by no means a dumb kid. Sure, I'd done dumb things just like any other child, but I was way, way beyond the point of eating crayons. Wax, to me, just didn't seem appetizing.

Which is precisely why I was baffled when faced with this accusation. Not knowing how to handle being falsely accused at such a young age, I immediately started bawling and trying to string together a sentence to form a defense without sobbing in-between words. Taking my crying as a sign of admittance, my mother demanded that I go to my room and told me that we would discuss my punishment when my stepdad came home from work a few hours later. I don't know what happened inside of my head at that exact moment, but tears stopped flowing and the gears in my head started turning. I knew that once the both of them had rallied against me, all hope was lost, and that I would be labeled a "crayon eater" forever. So I summoned every bit of courage I had at the time, and outright denied having nibbled on that crayon or any other crayon before, and that the one in question had just broken in two.

Naturally, my mother was having none of this. Having been given the entire day to form this batshit crazy scenario in her head, she was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had in fact taken a bite, her argument driven home by the fact that the crayons' edges didn't match up as if from a break.

Aside #3: I don't know if I colored with one of the broken halves before throwing it away, or if she'd tampered with them, but they really didn't match up. I'm still not sure why.

Then she brought something up that must have seemed like a trump card in her mind. A few days previous, I'd gone to the restroom and stood up to see that my feces was a dark green. Freaking out, just as any paranoid child would, I immediately ran to tell my mother about this revelation, dragging her by the arm into the bathroom to show her what had just come out of me. Being assured that "sometimes it happens," I thought nothing more of it.

Aside #4: Over a dozen websites tell me that this is a side-effect of either eating too much green food or an iron overdose. Being a kid that survived off of artificially colored crap and chicken nuggets, it very well could have been either.

But she did. Seeing my green poop as the final piece of the puzzle in her case against me, she would hear none of my arguments in defense of my maturity level. Logic didn't even sway her, refusing to admit that it was odd that I'd tell her about my bowel movements when I should have known the cause outright.

This was the stalemate we were in until my stepdad arrived. Taking her side just as any good husband would, all hope seemed lost. But some small part of me knew that an injustice had happened, and continued to refuse to admit that I'd done anything that they were accusing me of. Seeing this as insubordination and an outright lie, I was told that I would have to sit on the couch in our family room, doing absolutely nothing, until I admitted that I was lying and that I had in fact eaten the crayon.

I sat there for three weeks. Every day after I came home from school I'd make a beeline straight towards the couch and sit there until it was time to eat dinner, after which I'd go straight from the table to bed. There was no way I was ever going to own up to something I hadn't done.

And I never did. Eventually, my couch-sitting sentence was reduced to a few hours a day, followed by an hour, followed by nothing at all. My parents had given up on trying to get their version of the truth out of me, and we didn't really speak about it much afterwards. They never admitted their folly, and I never again tried to correct them. It became an anecdote lost in the sands of time.

Years later, after all of the wounds from this event had healed, the three of us were out to eat with my younger brother at a generic chain restaurant that gives children a packet of crayons to every child that walks in the door. Of course, my brother received one, along with whatever coloring placemat they were offering that month. Opening the crayons, my stepdad removed the green one and offered it to me.

"Appetizer?" he asked, grinning smugly.

The Potato Salad Story

No one ever believes me when I say that I hate potatoes.

Aside #1: Except for French fries. Those don't count.

Mashed, diced, baked, it doesn't matter. I absolutely despise them. Not because of how they taste, or feel (as I so commonly tell people), but because I had a...traumatic experience involving them when I was around 9 years old.

My mother, stepdad and I had all sat down to eat dinner. I can't be sure as to what the main course was, but it doesn't matter. Amongst the two or three side-dishes that were sitting on the table, I saw one that I'd never tried before. It was potato salad, and my mother told me that I'd have to at least try it before I was to be excused from dinner. Not a big deal, right?

Wrong. After finishing everything else on my plate, the ominous, lumpy "salad" still remained. Using my fork, I cut a corner off of one of the potato chunks before putting it into my mouth. Almost instantly, I felt my throat close as my gullet simply refused to accept the food that was being shoveled down it. I spit it out into my napkin before being scolded by my parents for what had just happened. My mother, never missing a chance to make me feel guilty for even the tiniest thing, put her hand over her mouth dramatically and claimed that she had "lost her appetite." After she left the table, I was left to face my stepdad, someone I didn't know too well at the time.

Aside #2: He had married my mom less than two years earlier.

I didn't know it at the time, but I would soon discover that he was a very hard-headed individual. One that clearly didn't consider my choked-on slice of potato to be a "true bite."

Aside #3: If my life story ever becomes a sitcom, I'd love to have clearly exaggerated version of kid-me sketch out a diagram on a napkin of what should be considered a "true bite" in relativity to the mass of the object being bitten vs. the mass of the actual bite. Genius kids always get good ratings.

After unsuccessfully trying to coerce me into eating more (something I think anyone would refuse to do, given the situation), he began to get frustrated with me, telling me that I was absolutely forbidden to leave the table until I had eaten a single chunk of potato. Matching his stubbornness, convinced that the potato "bite" in question had nearly killed me, I continued my single-food strike until well after he'd left the table, minutes ticking by on the oven clock across the kitchen.

Soon, a few hours had passed. I kept sitting, refusing to budge until I either died of starvation or they were forced to let me get up. Suddenly, it was well past midnight, and both of my parents were asleep. Laying my head down on the table next to my plate, I fell asleep.

The next morning, I woke up with the sun. My mother was already up, brewing her usual pot of coffee. After seeing that I'd woken up, she walked over to me.

"Did you sleep here the entire ni-"

Her words were cut off as thick, white vomit spewed from my mouth and nose, all over the mostly-empty plate sitting in front of me. Rushing over to comfort me, my mother began to mop up my vomit with a dish towel after telling me that she was going to make me some chicken nuggets after I'd gone to the bathroom to clean myself up.

Aside #4: I've never really thought about it before, but I find it funny that my mom had no issue with seeing me vomit, but had a huge issue with me spitting out a tiny piece of potato that I hadn't even chewed once. Also, it should be noted that she made me chicken nuggets an such an early hour because normal breakfast food would have likely upset my stomach even more.

Standing up and walking down the hallway, my stomach felt empty. My kidneys ached from lack of urination. I could barely hold my head up. But I had won. For the first time in my life, I stood up for something I believed in, and never backed down for a second. Every argument or fight I've ever won, every time I've defended anything I believed in has stemmed from this one moment of pure, unabashed victory.

But as I mentioned earlier, winning came with a price. I have never, ever eaten potatoes in any sort of raw form in the ten-plus years since. I've tried, but I simply can't do it.

I guess there is just something deep, deep within me, buried in the back of my head, near all of my primal instincts and central programming that refuses to let the silent assassins known as potatoes make another attempt at my life.

My First Erection

I've been on a few school-sponsored field trips in my life, but my first one stands out as being the most memorable. It was spring, and my second-grade class was going to the local ice-skating rink to be taught how to skate. This was a huge deal, since most of us had never been on a school bus before, as it was a method of transportation commonly reserved for "big kids." Something about their big, bolted-on sides of sheet metal and revving diesel engine fascinated us as kids, and the class as a whole couldn't be more excited. It didn't even matter where we were going at this point, just that we were going as a class, and that blew our minds.

Walking single-file to the bus lanes behind my school, my friends and I couldn't stop chattering to one another. We wondered if it had seatbelts, or if our teacher would be driving, or maybe even the principal. We wondered if it could go through mud, or what would happen if a car hit it. We stretched our imaginations far as an eight year-old's mind could.

Finally our teacher, Ms. McClure, arrived at the bus' folding doors. The driver opened them with a hiss, and she stepped inside. After exchanging a few words with him, she stepped back outside and told us that we could get on after finding a "bus buddy" to sit with.

Aside #1: Remember the part in the first Toy Story movie where Woody tells everyone that they need to get a moving buddy to keep track of, so that no one gets lost when Andy moves? Same concept.

After pairing up with my best friend, a freckled boy named Blake, we stepped inside and took a seat towards the middle. Ms. McClure stood at the front of the bus and quieted us down in a way only patient grade-school teachers can. She told us that we needed to show the bus driver how well-behaved we could be, and that we should talk quietly to our "bus buddy" while en route. She sat down, and the bus pulled away from the school.

We drove for a short time, most of us enjoying the moving scenery flying by outside. Soon we arrived at the rink, with a small group of people milling about in dark blue windbreaker track suits standing outside. These people, we would come to find out, were our instructors.

Stepping off of the bus, the two dozen or so students were split into five groups and dispersed amongst the trainers. Blake and I stayed together, being put into a group lead by an overzealous 50-something woman that appeared to have far too many teeth for her mouth. The other three kids were named Chase, Michael and Veronica (the rail-thin tomboy of the class). I hadn't really spoken to any of them before this point, so Blake and I milled about apart from the group before being ushered inside.

Aside #2: In the fourth grade, Chase was sent to the principal's office for dumping Elmer's glue on his desk on a Friday before coming back on Monday to pick it off and eat it during class. True story.

As our instructors were sizing us for our skates and telling us a condensed history of ice skating, I noticed that Michael had broken away from our group and was talking to Ms. McClure a short distance away. She handed him a small duffel bag that had been laying at her feet, and he unzipped it quickly. As he was pulling a pair of brand new skates from it, my mind started connecting dots. It was obvious to me that Ms. McClure had bought Michael these skates, and I felt a weird surge of jealousy hit me. I was a single child at this point, so I was not used to this feeling. I didn't know how to react. So like most jealous people, I stood there and seethed until it was time for me to put my skates on.

After a lot of fussing around, some of the more confident skaters started to trickle onto the ice next to the sizing station. Michael was amongst them, fluidly stepping from the solid ground into the rink like he had done it a million times before. Easily gliding around the other students, he was the only one out of the entire class not using a training bar for support.

Aside #3: For those of you that have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm referring to the device that looks like a walker without wheels, meant to be leaned on for help with balance while skating.

Despite my inability to stand while wearing the heavy skates, I was actually enjoying myself, laughing as Blake and I slipped and fell onto our knees and bottoms, drenching our jeans and making us shiver. Eventually, we became bored with failure and decided to leave the rink and turn in our skates. It was nearing the time when we were scheduled to leave, and we wanted to dry off in the bathroom like most of the other students had gone to do.

Slowly making our way towards one of the doors to the rink, we heard a thud and felt the ground shake. It sounded like someone had hit the ice with a hammer. I turned around and saw Michael on the other side of the rink, with his face on the ice. A geyser of blood was erupting from the lower half of his face, and he was sobbing uncontrollably. One of the instructors quickly skated out and picked him up, bringing him around to the door that I had just gone through. As he was carried by like a sort of giant, bleeding baby, I managed to get an up-close look at his injuries. His front teeth were completely missing, leaving two angry red holes where they once had been.

Aside #4: Not knowing if they were his baby or adult teeth, the instructor had also managed to pull them out of the ice to possibly be re-inserted. Luckily, they were not his permanent teeth.

Ms. McClure quickly called Michael's mother, and she arrived within ten minutes. After they left, the entire class was left buzzing about what had just happened. The instructor that had picked Michael up off the ice was now skating out to the red spot where he had fallen with an armful of plastic safety cones, setting them up in a triangle around it. We lined up to leave, with each of us pairing up with our "bus buddy" again.

Just as we were walking out, my eye caught sight of Michael's black duffel bag sitting empty where he had left it. I told Ms. McClure, and she asked me to go get it for her. Reminded of my anger at her for playing favorites, I glumly walked over to the bag and picked it up. By the time I had shuffled outside, everyone was on the bus and ready to go. Blake had been forced to partner up with Michael's abandoned "buddy," so Ms. McClure had me sit next to her in the seat behind the driver. This gesture slightly soothed my jealousy, and we rode in silence as she graded papers next to me.

After steaming for a few minutes, I couldn't take it anymore. I had to know why she had bought Michael those skates. So I asked her, while making eye contact with the back of the driver's head. To my surprise, my inquiry was met with a giggle that made my heart leap, followed by her explaining that Michael had brought the skates from home and that she was just holding them for him on the bus ride to the rink. She winked, and slyly told me that Michael was definitely not her favorite in the class. I wasn't and still am not sure if she was implying that I was her favorite.

But regardless, that's how I took it, and swelled with pride. Literally. Before I knew it, something was happening in my still-wet jeans that had never happened before. I didn't know what to do, and was beginning to panic.

Anatomy class tells you that the male sexual organ isn't exactly fully developed at this point, so the front of my jeans only rose a tiny bit before stopping. At that age, anything moving down there without you touching it is reason for worry, so I covered up my lap with Michael's bag. The rest of the bus ride was torture. Between sweating and trying to feel out exactly what was going on underneath my clothes, I was a wreck. I stealthily tried everything I could think of to try to get it to go away. I pushed on it, pulled on it, pinched it and punched it, finally giving up as we were pulling up to the school.

Quickly, I formulated a plan that involved sitting on the bus until everyone had left it, thinking it might be gone if I waited a few minutes. This plan was foiled by Ms. McClure, however, as she asked me to stand up so she could get out before anyone else had. Still holding the bag to my crotch, I stood up and faced the front of the bus. After she had left the seat, I sat down again immediately and pretended to listen to her address the class. When she was finished, she looked down at me and smiled.

"Thanks for getting this for Michael, it was really nice of you," she said, taking the bag from my grip.

Once it left my lap, she gasped as she saw the tiny tent I had pitched underneath. Before I had a chance to react, one of the other kids, named Nick, poked his head around the corner of the seat and grinned like an idiot.

"Ty-ler has a bo-ner!" he announced to the rest of the bus in a singsong voice.

The bus erupted into laughter as the blood emptied out of my erection and made its way to my face.

Aside #5: Looking back, I'm sort of curious as to how so many second graders knew what a boner was. Nick was one of those kids who "knew everything" at a young age, and would later tell me that sex was when a guy peed in a girl's vagina. I'll bet most of the others were just laughing at the inflection that he said it in. I hope.

Clearly trying not to make a bad situation worse, Ms. McClure dropped the bag back onto my lap. I had my head down as she calmed the class down and started to lead them off of the bus, every last one of them passing by my seat and laughing at me. After climbing off of the bus, I joined the end of the already-formed line back to class in shame. For the next few weeks, the field trip wasn't referred to as "when we went to the ice rink," it was "the time Tyler got a boner on the bus." It was brutal.

I did receive some form of solace, however. When Michael had returned to class a couple of days later, he brought a card he'd made at home, thanking me for remembering his duffel bag for him. I don't know if anyone told him about the incident on the bus, but his handcrafted note unknowingly made the fallout feel a little less awful.